This invention relates to a new and distinct variety of pear tree, and more particularly to a sport of the pear tree commonly known as the Anjou or Beurre d'Anjou.
The original specimen of this new variety of pear was discovered by the inventor as a sport spur twig, in the month of September 1976, in his orchard located on O'Leary Road, in the Dee Flat area of Hood River Valley, Oreg. On the sport spur twig, which was growing in the very top portion of a 60-year-old Beurre d'Anjou pear tree, was a single bright-red fruit which was distinctly different from the green-colored standard Anjou pear fruits borne on the rest of the tree. In succeeding years this small spur twig grew into a sport limb which continued to bear bright-red fruits identical to the original single fruit.
Immediate steps were taken to preserve and to further test the newly discovered sport variety. The newly discovered sport was first asexually reproduced by the inventor in 1979, by grafting. Scions of the new sport limb were placed on pear seedlings and clonal rootstocks, and second generation trees were propagated and planted, to see if the overall bright-red coloring characteristic of the fruit would be transmitted through asexual reproduction to succeeding generations of trees. In the years following discovery of the sport limb, several older pear trees located at Parkdale, Oreg., and at Parker, Wash., were topworked with scion wood from it.
All second generation trees now in bearing have illustrated that the distinctive overall bright-red coloring characteristic of the fruits is established and has been transmitted to successive generations by asexual propagation of the newly discovered pear tree.
Additional tests were conducted to see if other characteristics of the newly discovered sport were different from the corresponding characteristics of fruits harvested from standard Anjou trees and from another known sport of the common Anjou, the Red Anjou which is the subject of Gebhard U.S. Plant Pat. No. 1,992.